You have put your blood, sweat and tears into your business. Countless hours have been devoted to making it your life’s work. You provide excellent customer service. Then, a disgruntled customer decides to destroy the reputation of the business you have worked so hard to build.
In the age of social media, a reputation can be destroyed after a few minutes of typing on a smartphone or keyboard. And, because of what many consider an outdated law, the person – or business – who’s reputation is damaged online can do little about it.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 is a federal law that mostly gives protection to online platforms hosting the work – or opinions – of others. For example, a person could sue a newspaper or television station for stories that falsely ruined their reputation. But if a person or business is maligned on Yelp, Google Review or Facebook, generally the sites are protected from legal action.
While there have been efforts from both sides of the political aisle to repeal Section 230, for various reasons, those efforts have fallen short to date. Dave Nourse, a UNLV professor who teaches the Social and Digital Communications class as part of the school’s Urban Leadership Master’s program, thinks the nearly-30-year-old law has not kept up with our technology and society.
“I think we are overdue to examine Section 230. The world has moved on, the law has not,” Nourse says.
He notes that the crafter of the law couldn’t have envisioned the type of technological world we live in today. “They didn’t see the unintended consequences of the law,” Nourse says.
Conservatives have been trying to repeal Section 230 in recent years, including then-President Donald Trump. Many Republicans have claimed tech giants, such as Facebook and then-Twitter (now X), have used Section 230 to censor and malign people they disagree with politically, and then hide from any legal consequences. But much less is said about the impact Section 230 has on businesses that are smeared online.
At some point in the future, the law will likely be amended, Nourse predicts. But, in the meantime, there are steps a company – or person — can take to limit the reputational harm caused by a bad online review.
The professor teaches his master’s students how to be savvy online. This includes dealing with the likely event that, at some point in time, they will have negative comments made about them online.
Sometimes, these online criticisms are outrageous. Nourse recounted a fellow UNLV professor who was maligned by one of her students on the site, “ratemyprofessor.com.”
“The student said the professor was teaching her class in lingerie on Zoom,” he recalls. Of course, this was an outright lie. Nourse was able to help that other professor get the false, damaging post taken down.
If there is an obviously false post about a person or business online, Nourse advises going to Yelp or Google Reviews and ask the site to remove the false content. While not easy, these attempts can ultimately be successful.
“If there is something in there which is false — for example, you have somebody who is maliciously trying to harm the business by sharing information that’s false – and you can prove that, then you can absolutely go to the platform and ask that they take that information down,” the UNLV professor explains. “But it has to be something which is false, right? Just because it’s a bad review doesn’t necessarily mean that these platforms are obligated to pull it down.”
“What is both more challenging and common is the review from a dissatisfied customer. Unfortunately, federal law as it is, leaves the business owner to do damage control, Nourse concedes.”
“Section 230 does cover these platforms, whether it’s Google Review or Yelp or, you know, name your online crowdsourcing platform of information. This is because the individuals that are posting the reviews, by and large, are not employees of these particular organizations. Instead, the platforms are simply hosting that information,” he explains. “Now, most of these organizations will have mechanisms for business owners to dispute the review, right?”
A Yelp or Google Reviews should have a way to dispute a review. But unless the review is a provable lie, the business owner is dependent on the good will of the platform to remove the negative post, Nourse points out.
“It might be a scathing review, but it’s more or less true — because of the way that Section 230 is interpreted — the platforms (may not) have immunity. But (instead) they have this cover that Section 230 provides them.”
Some Potential Legal Loopholes to Section 230 Online Protections
The legal protection offered to online platforms by Section 230 may not be absolute. Nourse suspects there may be exceptions to the law’s “cover” under certain circumstances.
“Let’s say you graduated from UNLV and you had a really negative experience and you worked for Yelp, and then somebody writes a really negative review of UNLV,” he gives an example. “And, you do something to modify that post to really make UNLV show as poorly as possible. I think that’s more along the lines of kind of where the platform could then get in trouble.”
This could happen if someone employed by the hosting platform – such as Yelp — modifies a message “to make something seem even more damning, or to include some keywords that you think might gain some more traction through search engines. Or, (they change) the way algorithms work. Things like that could get (the platform) in trouble,” Nourse adds.
Companies Can Do Damage Control Online
When faced with a negative post about you or your company, Nourse advises other strategies to mitigate the effects of bad online reviews.
A business can opt to do nothing, and let its good reputation speak for itself online, he offers. “You can ignore the troll. If you have 33 good reviews, and only one or two bad reviews, people will know this doesn’t (fit), right? People are savvy. We all know what trolls are.”
But, in general, Nourse advises professionals to respond and try to respond to all comments made about them professionally – both the good and the bad.
“I teach ‘social listening.’ It means you need to be cognizant of what people are talking about, but you also need to have kind of a crisis plan in place,” he says of online business complaints. “Have you responded to it? Are you showing empathy? Are you doing the things that you know are going to make it seem like you’re paying attention to what people are saying about you?”
The professor advises his students to pay attention “both when (customers) saying good things and when they’re saying not so good things. Again, that’s part of doing business in 2024.”
He advises replying to most online posts, unless it is an obvious troll. Nourse also gave the recent example of AT&T promising its customers to “do better” after the massive service outage in February, as an example of handling bad press.
For those unfairly damaged online, Nourse does not know exactly when some legislative relief from Section 230 will arrive. But the professor says he thinks, eventually, the law will be changed.
“The fact that these conversations are happening is a good thing.”
Valerie Miller is an award-winning Las Vegas Valley-based journalist. She can be reached at (702) 683-3986 or [email protected].
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